"...those pleasures so lightly called physical."

"Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.
I no longer love her, it is true, but maybe I still love her."

It's not as if Pablo Neruda ever met Colette, let alone wrote these lines for her. But they are the right lines for me, now, to describe my lingering, conflicted fondness for and deep aesthetic debt to Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette.

A prolific author, music hall artist, and thrice-married woman of the world who scarcely left her beloved France, she carefully constructed a public persona as a party girl, libertine, and erotic pioneer. She had a talent for investing the everyday with all the grandeur and marvel of magic, and wrote essays about New Year's Eve parties, apartment moves, luncheon dates, and home renovations that were as adventuresome and exotic as her reportage on a Moroccan murder trial, a Montmartre opium den, or Paris during the Occupation.

I adore her. But I don't read her anymore.

Why not? Because I am old enough now to see through her, somehow, to observe the author Colette manipulating the strings of Colette the character. Because I know some things about her willful exaggerations, her dissembling, her shaping of the facts of her life to her own liking. I know more than I wanted about her mother and about the kind of mother she, in turn, was. I still love her words, and perhaps I will go back to reading her some day, at a less tender age (is there such a thing?), at an age when I don't need to believe so unflinchingly in her wisdom and her commanding presence within her own life.

For my heroine's fall from grace I blame, in part, the stunning and brilliant biographer Judith Thurman, a Colette scholar whose gorgeous and chillingly revealing biography, Secrets of the Flesh, changed my mind about the private Colette forever. But Thurman alone is not to blame. My own life experiences are.

I first discovered Colette when I was 22 and new to D.C. and very weepy over a lovely man who'd recently dumped me, never to look back (well, only that once). I was waiting tables nights and sleeping on the floor of a 400-sf apartment in Adams-Morgan, so I had my days free.

Every few days I took a long soggy walk to the Georgetown branch of the D.C. Public Library, which was housed in a spooky old manse at the top of a high hill. There I would load my arms with books to take my mind off, well, off being so goddamn young.

One afternoon I was sitting on the floor in the stacks and I came across a book called My Apprenticeships. Sounded about my speed. I opened it up and was enchanted.

What little I know about writing, I feel I learned at her knee. And once I felt I was also learning about life from her. I don't, even now, believe that is completely wrong. But somehow, ethically, or in terms of what I know I must do in matters of love and family, I feel I have outgrown her.

Yet, still, I wish to take refuge in her great embrace of the world, her invitation to pleasure and rigorous attention as a means of enlightenment, her Earthly Paradise:

"If I can't have too many truffles, I'll do without truffles."

"A happy childhood is poor preparation for human contacts."

"Look for a long time at what pleases you, and a longer time at what pains you."

"Time spent with cats is never wasted."

And her understanding of grief, which I still know is sterling and far greater than mine:

"By an image we hold on to our lost treasures, but it is the wrenching loss that forms the image, composes, binds the bouquet."

categories: life love thought words